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Blog utilisateur:Ttibot/Open letter to wikia staff about UX and existing communities
Hi Wikia staff, This is an open letter. Please excuse my broken English, I’m French. I'm an early contributor to this wiki. Like everyone I participated in making 40 arguments models. At this time I mainly think in making something fast for who had "read the fucking manual". Also my orientation was to use inputboxes to transform page creation into form filling. Faster again, and help to create a structured wiki which help a lot the reader. I did it because I only made the separation between the reader, the admin and the very casual contributor. We build inputboxes that generated templates. There is a page with plenty of inputboxes in help. Seems easy when you know, more complicated when you don't know. All of this was created among one contributor persona : the gamer who have fun exploring the wiki, like me, like quite all the members of the community. When I look forward to this experience I remember that this was like a game ground. Some sort of construction game. Yet as long the castle was growing, as it became more complicated. Modifying other people templates was a challenge, well, an interesting challenge. Hopefully there weren't really a need to do it unless to update templates from absent people, which was a very admin job. Time have passed and in trainings to studies I grown from engineer to an user experience designer. The first times I entered in the UX & Ergonomic world I felt designing good interactions as designing something the most simple as possible for the user. It is very funny I came back to Wikia a few time ago and I see you follow exactly the same line. You want things simples, you just made a new WYSIWYG editor in which templates are hidden in small grey boxes for newbie contributors. Which mean in fact they consider it as things they should not use, so wikis can’t anymore base on templates for other things than administration. But then I came to work in service design fields linked with 2.0 communities, I'm currently making a master thesis on it. It is here I discovered that communities always have a tendance for complexifing if they can. To be short it is about emulation, and creating them own universe, them own fun. This is a part of what gives the user experience in entering a community. Passing the barriers means to pay the bill of entering the community's universe. A good example of this is that all professions have them own jargon and rules. For example in UX fields if you don't know what is "Information Architecture" you will not be able to understand what a colleague is telling to you. Communities don’t care about user experience for newbies unless this is one of the identified rules. Here is the first schizophrenia of wikis. Wikis are at the same time sites contributed at half by general people, and sites that are based on community dynamics. You have to make it clear that you want to change the dynamics : making a site without barer to enter. But a site without barer must not mean a site without a community fun. And here is the second schizophrenia of wikis. Some may say : a community fun should be based only the wiki's topic. Yet there is a small community n the large community. And this small community are the admins. The admins needs a fun that is different from the large community. And this fun is obviously based on building the site. To avoid this create a schizophrenia you have only one solution : don't let the community fun base on playing with the tool in a way it complexity it. Better... You may also make it so the community fun is based on building a site that is friendly for newbies. This is for the theories. In this theories all what makes Wikia currently is good. The impossible to use templates in WYSIWYG editor, pushing for wikis being newbie friendly... Forcing communities to adopt newbie friendly tools created by Wikia... Lol.... A point... What was Mediawiki at it first times. A wiki engine created by a community of geek people who had a lot of fun too creating it. In times where User Experience was note understood so well. What is Mediawiki today ? Yes, I get it, it is the most complex wiki in the user point of view. It is not a bad thing. As I said complexity had also interesting points. Yet the complexity of the tool has always been there, and had an influence on existing communities’ dynamics. All of this formed the recip wich leaded to the current GW Wiki (and others I think) UX. This UX is based on high barreers in community entrance, wich is obviously a problem for recruiting new members. GW Wikia fr is an example of this. All the content is based on very structured templates. Templates you offered and demonstrated as powerful tools for creating content. We had decided to use this tool to create a structure, and to simplify the contributor life in a special way, wich is not optimum. GW Wikia is mainly based on filling forms admins have created. This makes contribution faster. This also creates a great user experience in the reader point of view by structuring the content. Yet it does not makes adoption easier... So GW Wikia fr is mainly based on contributors that passed the barrier and entered in the own community user experience. This is a fact. Another fact is that templates are here now and GW Wikia will not be able to change his 10 220 pages. So yes GW Wikia is willing to make newbee users able to come in more easily. Yet please consider that: * GW Wikia is not anymore able to simplify it the way you tell it. * You opened yourself the doors to those dynamics by the way Mediawiki works itself. * You are trying to oblige a community going in a way you have decided as an hoster and where it can’t go. So, all what you do currently is good for new communities, but I suggest you interest more closely the different cases of your existing communities. Since GW Wikia fr can’t modify all of its structure. The best way is to think in an intelligent manner to get a better user experience. At his point I link you tothe forum page, where this can be discussed. Edit : there is now also a page for making proposals and getting a syntesis to work on newbies-adoption UX. See Here Thanks. --Ttibot septembre 7, 2009 à 19:56 (UTC) Catégorie:Article de blog